The Tea Party Got Clobbered Last Night

Idaho's 2nd Congressional District was supposed to be a proxy
battle to set the tone for the establishment vs. grassroots
Republican fight of the 2014 midterm elections.

In the end, it hardly ended up being a battle — like many of the
intra-party fights across the country.

Incumbent U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson, who was running for a ninth
term, crushed his Tea Party-aligned challenger, local attorney
Bryan Smith. Simpson garnered almost 62% of the vote to Smith's
38.3%.

The race was a costly one in which groups backing both candidates
spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. But in the last few weeks
leading up to the Idaho primary, the Club for Growth — the major
group backing Smith — quietly shifted resources away from Idaho
and into the Nebraska Senate race.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has already had success
backing a number of establishment candidates, kept pouring money
into the race on Simpson's behalf. Over the last month, it ran an
ad in Idaho featuring the endorsement of former GOP presidential
candidate Mitt Romney.

"This race was a top priority for the Chamber to engage early and
locally to support Simpson and highlight his record," said Rob
Engstrom, the senior vice president and national political
director of the Chamber. "We will continue to stand with him."

Across the rest of the country, the story was the same. In three
key Republican battles to determine the party's Senate nominees,
establishment-aligned candidates prevailed:

In Georgia, businessman David Perdue
and the Chamber-backed U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston advanced to a GOP
runoff. U.S. Reps. Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey, the race's
two most flamboyant, conservative Republicans, didn't come close.
Not even the Sarah Palin-backed Karen Handel made the
runoff.

In Oregon, despite a late-breaking scandal that made
national headlines over the final few days of the race,
neurosurgeon Monica Wehby dispatched of conservative challenger
and state Rep. Jason Conger,
50.7-37.1.

Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman
Schultz argued Tuesday night that the results were not indicative
of the Tea Party's decline. Rather, she said they proved
conservative challengers had successfully pushed the party to the
right.

"Even the candidates purportedly backed by the
establishment have been pulled so far to the right that it is a
distinction without a difference. The civil war in the Republican
Party is over and the Tea Party won," Wasserman Schultz said in a
statement.

But in each primary, the GOP's general-election chances
improved — including a win for the establishment in North Carolina two weeks
ago. Thus far, the party has avoided nominating any of the
"Todd Akin 2.0" candidates insiders feared would hamper their
chances at retaking control of the Senate. They need to swing six
seats to do so, a goal that looks increasingly attainable.

For Democrats, it might be time to panic.

"Election results last night were pretty much as
expected — the GOP has crushed the Tea Party, and the
Democrats can no longer count on running against right wing
'exotics,'" said Greg Valliere, the chief political strategist at
Potomac Research Group.

The party establishment wasn't shy in gloating about its
big win Tuesday night. Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who faced a disastrous primary challenge earlier this
year, tweeted back at an online activist who said the
conservative movement's "only mistake" was not running grassroots
Republican Katrina Pierson against Cornyn: